“She had Poppy. She had friends. And she had Mrs. Murdo, who was somewhere between a relative and a friend. But she felt as if she had suddenly gotten older in the last three days. She was sort of a mother herself now. What happened to Poppy was more or less up to her.”

“I’d been thinking before that I had to leave Poppy because she’d be safe with Mrs. Murdo. But when the lights went out, I suddenly knew: There is no safety in Ember. Not for long. Not for anyone. I couldn’t leave her behind. Whatever happens to us now, it’s better than what’s going to happen there.”

″‘But Ember is not prospering!’ he cried. ‘Everything is getting worse and worse!’ [...] ‘The blackouts!’ cried Doon. ‘The lights go out all the time now! And the shortages, there’s shortages of everything! If no one does anything about it, something terrible is going to happen!‘”

″‘Doon!’ cried Lina. ‘More lights!’ She pointed at the sky. He looked up and saw them—hundreds and hundreds of tiny flecks of light, strewn like spilled salt across the blackness. ‘Oh!’ he whispered. There was nothing else to say. The beauty of these lights made his breath stop in his throat.”

“Take a lamp, for instance. When you plug it in, it comes alive, in a way. It lights up. That’s because it’s connected to a wire that’s connected to the generator, which is making electricity, though don’t ask me how. But a bean seed isn’t connected to anything. Neither are people. We don’t have plugs and wires that connect us to generators. What makes living things go is inside them somehow.”

“The creature was utterly strange, not like anything they had ever known, and yet when it looked at them, some kind of recognition passed between them. ‘I know now,’ said Doon. ‘This is the world we belong in.‘”

″‘I been working on the generator for twenty years. it’s always managed to chug along, but this year...I don’t know. The thing seems to break down every couple minutes.’ He cracked a wry smile. ‘Of course, I hear we might run out of light bulbs before that, and then it won’t matter if the generator works or not.‘”

“Fire was rare in Ember. When there was a fire, it was because there had been an accident—someone had left a dishtowel too close to an electric burner on a stove, or a cord had been frayed and a spark had flown out and ignited curtains.... But it was, of course, possible to start a fire on purpose… The trick was to find a way to make the light last.”